welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

there is perhaps no greater pleasure in this world than the feeling of being understood

Case in point being an e-mail I received just now:

I have been wondering about your sanity ever since you started going off on Paul McCartney and his Starbucks campaign. Up until about 3 days ago, I had only seen one particular PM poster at Starbucks, which seemed pretty harmless. But the other day, I actually saw the poster which, I believe, is the one that set you off [see it for yourself here]. Now I totally understand. It's like Paul McCartney doing "Magnum/Le Tigre/Blue Steel" from Zoolander. It practically made me want to walk into Starbucks and start shooting. You were right all along. Sorry.

Yes! Keep in mind that I've walked by this poster at least once a day, sometimes several times a day, for seven weeks now.

My correspondent also points out that, by standard demographic definitions, Barack Obama is a baby boomer. Fine. He didn't go to college during the Vietnam War, and he wasn't in high school when the Beatles were together. These are what I take to be the key cultural markers of baby-boomerness, but it's absolutely correct that the demographic phenomenon went on a few years beyond that.

i don't know why no one seems to understand how much i hate the iTunes commercial featuring paul mccartney. i thought i posted a link to it when you first started your campaign against the poster. to me, the commercial is much, much, much more egregious.

After hearing about the "global listening event" that kicked off the Memory Almost Full total marketing blitz, I had no questions about the validity of your anti-anti-Starbucks rant and I hadn't even seen the poster that set you off, Jeremy. But holy crap -- that photo is absolutely Zoolander. Poor Paul. It would just be better for all of us if he let himself be seen as grizzled as does Bob Dylan.

I remember years ago listening to a recording of Kennedy's inauguration speech and realizing for the first time how one of its most famous lines might have sounded to many listeners: "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace ... " The "born in this century" part is a real dig, but also really telling.

So Obama, obviously, should be readying something similar --- "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans who were in college before finding out that Paul McCartney used to be in a band besides Wings."

Even if you were, in reality, just born yesterdayish and/or are totally illiterate where pop culture is concerned, wouldn't you still be more likely to have heard of The Beatles than Wings? Freaking Wings?